Cornell Students Call for Change at Fiery Public Meeting

New York|Cornell Students Call for Change at Fiery Public Meeting

There were fiery testimonies, voices lurching, and pleas for action from school leadership. There were fingers pointed angrily at Cornell University’s internal investigators, including by a woman who faced her student government representatives and said, emphatically: “I am also speaking as Jane Doe.”

Cornell’s student government convened a public hearing on sexual assault Thursday, and some 100 people turned out to share their raw emotions in a student union auditorium, Cornell flags and chandeliers hanging overhead.

Some broke down in tears, channeling the churning emotions of the broader campus. They walked forward, one by one, to offer testimonies, facing a semicircle of somber-faced student assembly representatives who were surrounded by backpacks and soda bottles.

“I cannot pretend this is a normal Thursday,” said Sophia Riley, a junior, remembering that as a freshman in 2024 she was shattered to hear that a student said she was assaulted at the Chi Phi fraternity house. “I cried about it then, and I’m still equally devastated now.”

In the days since a lawsuit and rape allegations put Cornell in the national spotlight, the school’s Ithaca campus has been consumed by the news. The meeting gave students a chance to denounce administrators, saying that they had mishandled the allegations of assault, though few school leaders were in the room and the university president, Michael Kotlikoff, was absent.

Some students expressed rage about the fraternity culture cited in the lawsuit. The suit had prompted the Tompkins County district attorney to reopen the investigation into the claims by a woman known only as Jane Doe that she was sexually assaulted by seven men at a fraternity house.